I Made A Thing - Notebook Edition

Last updated on 13 Aug 2015

I do a lot of interviewing at work which means I print a lot of resumes. I like to print them single sided so I can write notes on the back and so I’m often left with a lot of paper that has only been printed on one side. I have a kind of weird relationship with paper and I don’t often like to waste it.

For the last 6 or so months, I’ve been saving the paper from the old no longer needed resumes with the intention of recycling them somehow. After watching the video below, I suddenly knew how I wanted to do it:

Now, binding a book has been something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I’ve bought books on the topic, and was waiting on “time” to pull the trigger. After seeing how fast the guy above made his book and after a particularly slow day of testing installer builds which took forever to build and deploy, I decided to go for it.

I folded signatures of paper at work during downtime, and placed an order on Amazon for the following products:

Yesterday my box arrived, and I couldn’t wait to start binding when I got home.

I pretty much followed the same steps as in the above video, with my book filling in details as required, like how much space to leave between signature stitches.

After about 2 hours including 40 minutes of waiting for things to dry, I was left with the following notebook:

I made plenty of mistakes as I bound my first book – I wasn’t precise enough when putting the holes for the stitches, so some signatures were out of place. I didn’t use enough glue on the binding when placing the cloth, so the last signature sort of hangs out of the spine. I rushed the creation of my book cover, so it’s sized a little weird, and I accidentally glued it in crooked so the spine has an odd tilt to it.

Having said all that, I can’t help but pick it up and flick through it, knowing that yesterday it was just a pile of folded paper, and last week it was just sheafs of used paper sitting on my desk.